Top 100 Quotes About Life's Meaning
#1. The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.
Stephen Jay Gould
#2. A life's meaning comes not from the manner in which one dies, but in the manner in which one lives.
Mike Kalmbach
#3. The fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me a compelling argument for religious reverence rather than skeptical empiricism as a response to life's meaning.
David Foster Wallace
#4. These dilemmas present perhaps the most enduring conundrum of human history: can people derive their identity primarily by positive association or does life's meaning also require negative comparison to others?
William J. Clinton
#5. Everyone - pantheist, atheist, skeptic, polytheist - has to answer these questions: 'Where did I come from? What is life's meaning? How do I define right from wrong and what happens to me when I die?' Those are the fulcrum points of our existence.
Ravi Zacharias
#6. There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life's meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.
Andre Breton
#7. Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same.
E.B. White
#8. Always engage in the quest for life's meaning, which is inner peace.
Longchenpa
#9. We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning.
Carl Sagan
#10. A word meant something only between people, and life's meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans that undergirded meaning.
Paul Kalanithi
#11. To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.
Bill Watterson
#12. I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion. A word meant something only between people, and life's meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form.
Paul Kalanithi
#13. The hillsides and Alps looked as if they'd been sculpted and freshly seeded. Nothing appeared to be placed at random. The world is out of control, but the Swiss had purpose. They derived life's meaning from geography.
Scott Haas
#14. To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being and does not rise to personality, he has failed to realize his life's meaning. Fortunately,
C. G. Jung
#15. My focus on silence is to be understood as an intrinsic part of the body's search for meaning amongst the noisy assaults of everyday life ... What quilts have brought to the viewing of art generally is this intervening layer of silence, of collected thought and concerted attention.
Radka Donnell
#16. But it's not enough to just "discover" the meaning of life. What really matters is whether we live according to our values, and that takes hard work and a hundred hard choices every day.
Greg M. Epstein
#17. So what's the point of it all?"
"Seriously?" I asked. "Seriously? You're asking me for the meaning of life? Isn't that a little stereotypical?"
"Well it's a reasonable question," you persisted.
Andy Weir
#18. A woman's belly is the garden of life. Her mind is the gateway to meaning. Her heart is the source of love. And her eyes are the light by which the whole world sees beauty.
Toni Sorenson
#19. No one's life should be rooted in fear. We are born for wonder, for joy, for hope, for love, to marvel at the mystery of existence, to be ravished by the beauty of the world, to seek truth and meaning, to acquire wisdom, and by our treatment of others to brighten the corner where we are.
Dean Koontz
#20. A guy's gotta live, you know, gotta make his way and find his meaning in life and love, and to do that he needs coffee, he needs coffee and coffee and coffee.
Libba Bray
#21. I know my life's meaningful because" - and here he stopped, and looked shy, and was silent for a moment before he continued - " because I'm a good friend. I love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.
Hanya Yanagihara
#22. A blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing, But the man who lves that span, he is something ... A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning.
Chaim Potok
#23. The question is, do you have deliberate plans for your life? Do you have intentions with you time? God planned that there should be a time for everything and for every season, meaning you can plan for everything and every season in your life! You may ask, 'Is that possible?" I say, "It's up to you!
Archibald Marwizi
#24. Honoring Christ, magnifying Christ, making much of Christ. That was the meaning of Paul's life. It should be the meaning of ours. And Paul prays it will be the meaning of his death as well. We live and we die to make much of Christ.
John Piper
#25. The first morning after Westley's departure, Buttercup thought she was entitled to do nothing more than sit around moping and feeling sorry for herself. After all, the love of her life had fled, life had no meaning, how could you face the future, et cetera, et cetera.
William Goldman
#26. Effort is one of those things that gives meaning to life. Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it.
Carol S. Dweck
#27. Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realize that's not true, it's too late.
Muriel Barbery
#28. Each of us must become impassioned, finding meaning and self-fulfillment in our own life's journey.
Alexandra Stoddard
#29. My tattoos, like most people's, were reminders, badges of personal experiences. Yes, I might wear them on my skin for the world to see, but their meaning was a little too personal.
N.R. Walker
#30. Well Buddhism, 'shmoodism', I didn't go to India looking for Buddhism. I was looking for truth, or God, or a better way of life or happiness, fulfillment, meaning, purpose. And a way to become peace in the world and not just fight for peace, as we had in the 60's.
Surya Das
#31. Man's main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.
Viktor E. Frankl
#32. The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business.
Saul Bellow
#33. Looking into Napoleon's eyes, Prince Andrei thought about the insignificance of grandeur, about the insignificance of life, the meaning of which no one could understand, and about the still greater insignificance of death, the meaning of which no one among the living could understand or explain.
Leo Tolstoy
#34. After his failed political career, Lincoln often pondered the question of the purpose of the meaning of life. In 1850 [ten years before he was elected President], Lincoln told Herdon [his law partner] How hard, oh how hard it is to die and leave one's country no better than if one had never lived.
Ronald C. White Jr.
#35. How do they manage to go on living? ... By loving life. And-in spite of everything-by loving God. By having enough faith to start over again and again; enough faith to risk having our hearts break all over again. That's the true meaning of faith. It's the deepest kind of heroism.
Naomi Ragen
#36. There's been rumors of war and wars that have been The meaning of life has been lost in the wind And some people thinkin' that the end is close by 'Stead of learnin' to live they are learnin' to die
Bob Dylan
#37. Strange is the riddle of this life of ours!
Who knows the meaning of the heavenly powers?
Great Caesar's wounds bleed yearly in the rose,
And flower-like ladies turn again to flowers.
Omar Khayyam
#38. The Arcade, and now Peabody's, combined to tell me that there was life in objects, in books. It was all about having eyes to see the true meaning of things. As Pike proved daily, books held a kind of magic, an apparent as well as a hidden value.
Sheridan Hay
#39. Meaning bad isn't the issue. Meaning you do what you do. Not without consequences for other people, of course, sometimes very grave ones. But it's not very helpful to regard your choices as a series of right or wrong moves. They don't define you as much as you define them
Ann Packer
#40. The chances of finding out what's really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied.
Douglas Adams
#41. Freedom isn't about having permission to do whatever we want ... it's about having the courage to do whatever fills our life with meaning.
Bill Crawford
#42. I think essentially the meaning of life is probably the journey and not really any one thing or an outcome or a result. I think it's kinda the process and I think that if you can find happiness in the process then maybe that's it.
Charisma Carpenter
#43. The mantram becomes one's staff of life and carries one through every ordeal. Each repetition has a new meaning, carrying you nearer and nearer to God.
Mahatma Gandhi
#44. There is a point. I don't know what is it, but everything I've had, and everything I've lost, and everything I felt
it meant something. Maybe there isn't a meaning to life. Maybe there's only a meaning to living.
That's what I've learned. That's what I'm going to be doing. LIVING.
Kami Garcia
#45. Man's Chief purpose ... is the creation and preservation of values; that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life.
Lewis Mumford
#46. To see beauty is to learn the private language of meaning which is another's life - to recognize and relish what is. beauty must be defined as what we are, or else the concept itself is our enemy. why languish in the shadow of a standard we cannot personify, an ideal we cannot live?
CrimethInc.
#47. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
C.S. Lewis
#48. It's all you can say, when the end comes: 'I did not waste my time.' I think that matters. I think it may be all that matters.
Conn Iggulden
#49. Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor's mind toward some final resolution, some clear meaning, which it perhaps never finds.
Robert Anderson
#50. I'm not the type of artist that's like, 'Let's go out and party and dance your life away!' I think those artists are so cool, but I wanted meaning in my songs and they have messages.
Claudia Lee
#51. I wish I could tell every young girl with an eating disorder, or who has harmed herself in any way, that she's worthy of life and that her life has meaning. You can overcome and get through anything.
Demi Lovato
#52. French existentialism is an unhelpful philosophy in which to couch modern feminism: born from the ravages of the Second World War, it is a cynical, individualistic school of thought that posits the self and personal choice as the measure of life's entire meaning.
Naomi Wolf
#53. This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what's so.
Werner Erhard
#54. Education is an adventurous quest for the meaning of life, involving an ability to think things through.
Z. Applewhite.
Stephanie S. Tolan
#55. Hope is life's essential nutrient, and love is what gives life meaning. I think you need somebody to love and take care of, and someone who loves you back. In that sense, I think the New Testament got it right. So did the Beatles. Without love, nothing has any meaning.
Dick Van Dyke
#56. If you are a real writer, then just surrender to the writer's life, all of it, even the bad stuff. When you do that, the beauty appears: the peace, the meaning, the joy, the fulfillment, the sense that you are doing what you were born to do and what could be better, in the end, than that?
Lauren B. Davis
#57. Man's search for meaning is the chief motivation of his life.
Viktor E. Frankl
#58. Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn't have when you're actually living it. It's as though the whole thing were designed to be understood in hindsight, as though you'll never know the meaning of your experiences until you've had enough of them to provide reference.
Donald Miller
#59. But for all its benefits in offering moral guidance and meaning in life, in today's secular world religion alone is no longer adequate as a basis for ethics.
Dalai Lama XIV
#60. Music is not technique and melody, but the meaning of life itself, infinitely sorrowful and unbearably beautiful.
Pearl S. Buck
#61. Leonard asks me if there's anything I need to know before he dies, I think about it for a minute, turn to him, say what's the meaning of life, Leonard? He laughs, says that's an easy one, my son, it's whatever you want it to be.
James Frey
#62. That's the way life is: meaning is always there, but there is no clearly given way of decoding it. Conventional cinema obscures this with an easy reduction of meaning to plot and schematic characters.
Lenny Abrahamson
#63. I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
#64. George, she says it's the truth that matters. We live and die for the chance to maybe tell a little bit of the truth, maybe shame the Devil just a little bit before we go.
Mira Grant
#65. I live by 'Earnin' and burnin'.' Meaning, I like to make money and spend it before I even have it. That's the way I live my life.
Will Ferrell
#66. Life is not something that "has" meaning. It's something we give meaning to. You don't "end up" with a meaningful life, you create it.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
#67. There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life.
Viktor E. Frankl
#68. A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life's morning.
Carl Jung
#69. Let me guess," the frog interrupted,"Like every other human explored I've even met, you want to know the meaning of life."
"I didn't-"
"The answer's forty-four. The machine was off by two" the frog snapped, "Believe me, it makes a world of difference...
Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
#70. It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.
Max Frisch
#71. People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive ... so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. - JOSEPH CAMPBELL
Elizabeth Lesser
#72. Crap.
It's all crap.
Living is crap.
Life has no meaning.
None. Nowhere to be found.
Crap.
Why doesn't anybody realize this?
K-Ske Hasegawa
#73. To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare's Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters.
Ernst F. Schumacher
#74. Don't let anyone or anything rob you of the beauty and meaning at the heart of life. It's your birthright gift.
Parker J. Palmer
#75. I just want to tell you if that's what You have planned for me, if I am meant to be an obscure flower in the corner of the expansive garden, I will live there and I will love You and I will bloom just for You -- only, always, ever.
Sarah Thebarge
#76. No matter how you really feel at the moment or what is happening in your life, resolve to remain cheerful and upbeat. As Viktor Frankl wrote in his bestselling book Man's Search for Meaning, The last of the human freedoms [is] to choose one's attitude in any given set of cricumstances.
Brian Tracy
#77. There are many ways to achieve the same end, and that's the meaning of life - to explore our individuality and joy in living what matches our level of understanding, wisdom and honesty.
Daniel Marques
#78. There's no meaning to life without music. Everybody has their own connect with music.
Kailash Kher
#79. The events of one's life take place, take place. How often have I used this expression, and how often have I stopped to think about what it means? Events do indeed take place, they have meaning in relation to things around them.
N. Scott Momaday
#80. Aunt Esther: You think you supposed to know everything. Life is a mystery. Don't you know life is a mystery? I see you still trying to figure it out. It ain't all for you to know. It's all an adventure. That's all life is. But you got to trust that adventure.
August Wilson
#81. The term bisexual has ended up as the ugly stepchild of sexuality, in both name and meaning. Its fate is symptomatic of the bisexual's own lot in life: to be as common as can be, but unacknowledged.
Jennifer Baumgardner
#82. The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our intelligentsia's existence.
Nikolai A. Berdyaev
#83. It's very important for your life to have meaning. Even on the days it makes you unhappy, you still need a purpose.
Karin Slaughter
#84. Necessity with the illusion of meaning would be the highest achievement for man; but when it becomes trivial there is no sense to one's life.
Ernest Becker
#85. Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.
Paul Gauguin
#86. But the meaning of life is not ... explained by one's business life, nor is the deep desire of the human heart answered by a bank account.
Carl Jung
#87. What's something every teen should know?
MEANING OF LIFE ENACT,PERSONAL EXPERIENCE TO FACE LIFE EVENTS STORED IN FOR SELF,DO ASSIST OTHERS,RESPECT AND GUARD PARENTS AT OLD AGE AND TAKE THEIR BLESSINGS DAILY FOR FUTURE LIFE GREAT EXPECTATIONS.
Various
#88. Let's only care about the place where we are.
There's beauty enough in being here and not anywhere else.
If there's someone beyond the curve in the road,
Let them worry about what's past the curve in the road,
That's what the road is to them.
Alberto Caeiro
#90. Life's deepest meaning is not found in accomplishments , but in relationships
Gary Chapman
#91. I feel lucky. I think acting can help to keep you young. It does make you feel there's meaning in your life.
Jane Badler
#92. That's just the way I end up making meaning from the direct material in my life - I think what makes it accessible is the desire to communicate, more than anything. It does make it accessible, but that's not what motivates me.
Frances Stark
#93. Life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it; ... it is up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something it's as though you aren't there.
Alan Alda
#94. Knowing life's purpose would invest everything one did with meaning.
Kentetsu Takamori
#95. When I look back at that freedom of childhood, which is in a way infinite, and at all the joy and the intense happiness, now lost, I sometimes think that childhood is where the real meaning of life is located, and that we, adults, are its servants - that that's our purpose.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
#96. It has been my experience that nothing changes a person's life more than the discovery of one solitary truth: There is a meaning and purpose to life. More specifically: There is a meaning and purpose to your life.
Matthew Kelly
#97. There's no meaning to life as a wolf. If you don't have memories, it's like you never existed. You can't leave anything behind. I mean - how can I defend humanity? It's all that matters. Why would you throw that away?
Maggie Stiefvater
#99. That the chance to shape one's story is essential to sustaining meaning in life;
Atul Gawande
#100. I mean, I think even God would agree with this at this point. God's existence isn't important. It's what we do with what we've got that counts.
Michael Ruse
